Chapter 10 — A Simple Wish
White.
Not the white of a blank wall or a clean page. The white of something that had never been anything else — original white, the kind that existed before color decided to become a concept. It had no edges. No floor that Raj could identify with any certainty, though he was clearly standing on something. No ceiling. No walls. Just — white, in every direction, going on for what felt like a very long time before becoming more white.
Raj stood in it and took stock.
He was not in pain. That was the first thing. After the last several hours of his life, the absence of pain had a specific quality — noticeable, almost suspicious, the way silence was noticeable after a very long loud noise. He checked himself out of habit. Ribs — fine. Left arm — fine. Mana channels — present, which was unexpected, and empty, which was not.
He was also wearing his scout gear, he noted. Which seemed like an odd choice for wherever this was.
He pushed his glasses up his nose.
"Hello?" he said.
"One moment."
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere simultaneously and had the quality of something that had been speaking since before speaking was invented and was very good at it by now. Raj turned in a slow circle, looking for a source and found none. He stopped turning and waited. After a year of hero party training, he was very good at waiting.
Then she appeared.
The goddess sat in a chair that had not been there a moment ago, in the middle of the white nowhere, with the comfortable posture of someone who had been sitting there for centuries and had gotten the cushion situation exactly right. She was — beautiful was not quite the right word. Beautiful implied a comparison class, and the goddess existed somewhat outside the comparison class that word usually operated in. She was tall, luminous, with long silver hair that moved slightly in a wind that didn't exist, and eyes the color of the sky at the exact moment before it decided to become night.
She was also, Raj noticed with the part of his brain that noticed things before his social awareness could intervene, wearing something that could generously be described as a divine robe and less generously described as not very much fabric arranged with great confidence.
He looked at the white floor.
"You can look up," the goddess said, with the faint amusement of someone who had watched this reaction before. Frequently.
"I'm fine," Raj said, to the floor.
A sound that might have been a laugh. "Sit down, Raj."
A chair appeared beside him. He sat in it with great attention to looking at her face and only her face and absolutely nothing else, which was harder than it should have been because she was the only thing in an infinite white void to look at.
"You used the forbidden magic," she said.
"Yes."
"You knew the cost."
"Yes."
She studied him. Her expression was not unkind. It was the expression of someone who had watched a great many human decisions from a very long distance and had developed a complicated relationship with the concept of judgment. "Most people who reach for it do so in desperation. Panic. They don't choose it — it chooses them in a moment when choice has effectively ended."
"I chose it," Raj said.
"I know." A pause. "Lily was injured."
"Yes."
"And if Lily had not been injured?"
Raj thought about it honestly. "I would have found another way," he said. "Or I wouldn't have. I don't know. But she was injured. So."
The goddess was quiet for a moment. In the infinite white void, the quiet had a very full quality — packed with things that were being considered.
"You think you were the weakest," she said.
"I was the weakest."
"You killed the Demon King."
"Michal would have eventually," Raj said. "Or Christine. I just — I was there, and I had the angle, and I had the forbidden magic. It was circumstantial."
The goddess looked at him with an expression that was extremely difficult to read but contained something that might have been fond exasperation. "Raj," she said carefully. "The Demon King's strongest general. Do you know what rank it was?"
"High SS," he said. "The briefings said—"
"Peak SS," she corrected. "The highest confirmed output in the general's army. We — those of us who watch these things — had assessed that defeating it would require at a minimum two SS rank fighters working in coordination." A pause. "You killed it alone. In forty seconds. While poisoned."
Raj opened his mouth.
Closed it.
"You were tracking its movement pattern," she continued, with the air of someone presenting evidence to a very stubborn jury. "In under a minute. While managing a party coordination signal system. While maintaining a detection perimeter. While hiding the fact that you were poisoned from your entire party."
"Lily figured it out," he said.
"After eight hours," the goddess said. "An SS rank nun with decades of healing experience took eight hours to notice what you were hiding. Do you understand what that means about your ability to manage your own presentation under pressure?"
Raj looked at the white floor again. His brain was doing something uncomfortable — the process of revising a belief he had held for a very long time, using data he had apparently been sitting on and choosing not to examine.
"I was still the lowest rank," he said. Smaller this time.
"You trained exclusively against SS rank fighters for a year," she said. "You used them as your baseline for normal. That is like measuring your height against a mountain and concluding you are short." She paused. "You were S rank at assessment. After one year of training. Do you know what rank you were when you used the forbidden magic?"
He looked up.
"Early SS," she said simply. "You crossed the threshold approximately three weeks ago during a sparring session with Michal. He noticed. He chose not to tell you because he thought you would stop pushing yourself."
The silence that followed was very long.
"He was probably right," Raj finally said.
"Almost certainly," the goddess agreed.
A pause settled between them — comfortable, oddly. Like a conversation between two people who had gotten past the part that needed to be gotten past.
"You have earned a wish," she said.
Raj nodded slowly. He had suspected something like this was coming. Divine threshold, infinite white void, goddess in a chair — the wish felt structurally inevitable.
"I want to live," he said. "Just — live. Properly. School. Stupid small adventures. Bad days and good days and nothing riding on any of them." He paused. "I never really got that. My old world was quiet in the wrong way. And then this world was — loud in the wrong way. I want the middle version."
She looked at him for a long moment. "That is the smallest wish anyone has ever made in this room."
"Is that a problem?"
"No," she said. Something in her expression went genuinely soft. "It is my favorite so far."
She stood — which caused Raj to resume his examination of the floor with great dedication — and clasped her hands together in a way that felt formal.
"There is a condition," she said. "The forbidden magic carries a divine debt. I cannot send you forward without collecting it." A pause. "I have to take your holy mana. All of it. The affinity remains — you will still be all-type — but holy magic specifically is forfeit. Permanently."
Raj thought about it. Holy mana was Michal's strength, Lily's foundation, the party's primary weapon against demonic forces. For Raj, it had always been — supplementary. Present, useful, but never the thing he reached for first.
"Okay," he said.
She blinked. Just slightly. "You are not going to argue."
"I used the forbidden magic knowing the cost and I would do it again," he said. "Arguing about the bill seems ungrateful."
The goddess stared at him for a long moment. Then she did something he had not expected at all — she reached forward and very briefly, very gently, put her hand on top of his head in the way that someone might if they were trying to express something that formal language wasn't quite built for.
"New world," she said. "Different magic system. You will be unique there in ways you will have to navigate carefully." A pause. "Try not to be too humble about it this time."
Raj almost smiled. "No promises."
The white began to brighten — which seemed impossible given that it was already entirely white, but managed it anyway, building toward something beyond white, a light without a name in any language Raj knew.
"One more thing," the goddess said, from somewhere in the brightness.
"Yes?"
"Your mother took out the trash herself." A beat. "She was annoyed, but she is alright."
Something in Raj's chest — a small tight thing he had been carrying for a long time without examining — quietly came undone.
He closed his eyes.
The light took him.
End of Chapter 10